Raw food diet. there’s nothing foo-foo about it!
Every summer, nature gives us a chance to strengthen our health and get ready for the coming cold weather season with the help of various fruits, vegetables, berries, and fresh greens. This diet is delicious, useful to everyone without exception and is completely natural in the summer heat, when your mind doesn’t even remember about soups or hearty second courses.
Why not follow such a diet all the time? Moreover, you can take the first step even today. Some people do so – they completely abandon animal food and switch to vegetable nutrition, joining the numerous rows of vegetarians.
In every culture, there are myths about how people lived in a garden of Eden long ago, or just in harmony with nature, and then something terrible happened, and our ancestors were plagued by numerous misfortunes.
Of course, civilization development is impossible without agriculture and hunting, and people had to pay for this with their health.
And now, when we have the opportunity to choose almost any food, and we do not need to solve the issue of survival, we traditionally continue eating products that cannot be called truly useful. Moreover, we turned food from a necessity into a pleasure.
Modern people often eat not for the reason of being hungry, but for other reasons (emotional, social). By the way, the sole awareness of your motives for overeating and the ability to listen to your body can significantly improve your well-being and figure.
Undoubtedly, vegetarians also can health issues. Yet this happens only if the body does not get enough proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and other essential substances. If you approach the choice of products seriously and “learn the theoretical part”, you do not have to be afraid, because you can find
Proteins
in cereals, legumes, some vegetables
Fats
in nuts, seeds and vegetable oils
The raw foodism followers are convinced that plant food in its pristine form is the only right food for a human being. To defend this point of view, they present the fact that human beings, in fact, do not digest food themselves. Instead, many microorganisms that live in the intestine do this. It is proven that the intestine of an adult human being contains about a kilogram of bacteria.
Science does not fully understand the processes that occur in the human intestine, since many microorganisms do not develop in artificial media, and their study is extremely difficult. However, it has long been proven that plant food in the human intestine is digested by bacteria-fermenters. Wastes from these bacteria serve as a food for humans.
From this source, human beings receive about 10% of calories. In addition to the substances necessary to the human being, fermenters release hydrogen, which is the feed for other bacteria, waste products of which are utilized by others, and so on… In some sense, human beings are excluded from the digestion process. Their role is reduced to the choice of products and their preliminary preparation in the oral cavity and stomach.
An important role in this digestion model is played by enzymes or ferments – proteins found in plants and produced in the human body – which:
- soften the food,
- make it easier to split into nutrients.
Synthesis of enzymes is not yet within the power of science, since these are very complex compounds.
In the absence of enzymes in the body, our body has to make enormous efforts to produce them. In addition, during the cooking of plant foods, almost half of the proteins and more than half of the vitamins and minerals are destroyed (although there are also reverse examples: raw legumes contain toxins that are destroyed during soaking and boiling).
Concern for the preservation of enzymes explains the emergence of the “extreme” movement of raw foodism – mono raw food diet of monotrophic diet. Followers of mono raw food diets do not mix several products at one meal. They make breaks between them of 30 minutes to 3 hours, since each plant has its own set of enzymes, which when mixed in the intestines make digestion difficult.
This digestion model works perfectly only when a person consumes plant food only. When you eat meat, undigested residues remain in the intestines for a long time, making it difficult for the bacteria to work well together.
Another danger for human health, according to the raw foodists, are industrially produced products, which contain chemicals that are not only unnecessary, but also harmful to your health.
It would be a mistake to think that the raw foodists torture themselves with hunger, eat tasteless yet useful food and constantly struggle with temptations. Experienced raw foodists admit that after switching to vegetable food, meat and many industrial products simply ceased to cause appetite or even associate with food. When your body gets everything that it needs, it does not require anything extra.
There is an opinion that the vegetarian menu, especially that of the raw foodists, is very poor, because the possibility to change the natural taste of foods with the help of culinary methods is excluded.
It is possible that during a day or even a week raw foodists consume only 3-4 kinds of fruits. At that, during the year the raw foodist will certainly taste all the gifts of nature that ripen where they live, which can not be said about the adherents of the traditional food model. Of course, being a raw food in sunny Italy, for example, is much easier than in many other parts of the world, but you don’t have to forget that nothing is impossible, if you really want it.